


The Autumn Place, chapter I

by tuxedoblack



Category: Original Work
Genre: Afterlife, Autumn, Caretaking, Dark Fantasy, Death, F/M, Ghosts, Horror, Magic, Multi, Necromancy, Original Fiction, Original Slash, Other, Siblings, Spiders, Wakes & Funerals, funeral homes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-13
Updated: 2013-09-13
Packaged: 2017-12-26 12:12:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/965785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tuxedoblack/pseuds/tuxedoblack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sasha Fallon's brother Dane is dead. He's also in a lot of trouble. If she's going to help him escape a dead terrorist determined to overthrow the underworld, she's going to need the help of one cocky necromancer, a sturdy pair of boots, and plenty of spiders. A dark fantasy/horror novella that begins when everyone dies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Autumn Place, chapter I

**Author's Note:**

> This little piece of writing was born from an experiment/bet I made with a friend, to try and write a dramatic dark fantasy that revolved around something different than the standard male protagonist/female protagonist romantic relationship. Please, please do let me know what you think! I haven't yet decided if it's worth finishing.

At the end of it all, we made our promise. We made our plans. 

"I'll find a way, Sasha," my brother said, taking both of my hands into his own, the two of us sitting cross-legged on the floor of his bedroom, facing each other. The brother I'd always known had long since dissolved like sugar in warm water in response to the tumor slowly spreading throughout his vulnerable brain, taking root, seeping in between the wrinkles and dips of his gray matter. When I thought about it, which I made a conscious effort to avoid, I imagined the tumor as an actively malicious thing. Personalizing its arbitrary and inevitably fatal presence somehow validated my otherwise-impotent bitterness. Dane had long since developed a quiet acceptance of his own mortality, but I in my youthful arrogance and ignorance, I was determined to rage, rage, rage against the dying of my brother.

"How will I know it's you?" I asked him then, his bony wrists and long, spidery fingers unfamiliar still. He'd been a towering beanstalk of a young man, Dane had, once. Now his skin had gone sallow and milky, his huge liquid-dark eyes sunken back in their sockets, his neck as slender and delicate as a bird's. His soft, thick brown hair had been burned from his now-bare scalp by months of futile chemotherapy.

He thought for a moment. "The spiders," he finally said. And it was perfect, because the spiders had always guided us. I turned my head to glance at Lu in her cage, his Chilean rose tarantula with her fat, round abdomen sprinkled with a fine dusting of pale pinkish-silver fuzz. She was resting on top of her wooden hiding dome, her gleaming black fangs tucked away. "I'll send them to you, even if I can't speak directly to you, you'll know it's me," he promised, squeezing both of my hands and meeting my eyes.

We'd always existed in a strange and quiet sort of stasis, Dane and I, a life that suggested a dream of which none of its inhabitants were aware. Our home was also a funeral home, our living room occupied by rows of bulky coffins, their polished wood gleaming and their empty innards left exposed by their open lids. This was for the purpose of displaying the soft and elegant silk lining in various shades, but our mother had always warned us against playing or lying in them as children. We'd never been able to determine why - with the exception of the fairly morbid connotations such an image may have invoked, they were perfectly safe.

As a result of our upbringing, our hushed life out in the crisp northern woods of New England where autumn always seemed to linger and winter always resisted the melting-sun of summer as long as it could, Dane and I were considered strange by our peers. This was of little concern to us, considering that we rarely had occasion to interact with them. We were only two years apart in age, Dane the older of us, and our mother had homeschooled both of us. She too, was largely unconcerned with pressuring us into social lives with which we were uncomfortable, and we rarely approached the subject with her for fear that she would change her mind. It wasn't as if we had a television in the house to influence her into the majority opinion that young people should be out having promiscuous sex and experimenting with drugs and cruelty and generally making complete asses of themselves.

Dane's tumor had forced us out of the woods and into Boston however, our mother's ancient pickup truck valiantly wheezing its way through the journey to the looming white hospital there. They'd wrapped him in a fluttering paper gown and guided him by his arm as if his legs were affected by tumors as well, murmuring nurses dripping sympathy all over him as he'd sat down on an examination table. Paper crinkled against paper, and he listened quietly while it was explained that we had few options. The brisk, balding doctor delivering the news seemed confused and finally vaguely offended by our lack of response, our almost mild acceptance, but he didn't understand. This was familiar ground for us, death we knew.

They wanted to keep him there, to observe and test and flood his veins with their chemicals that would prolong his naturally fading life out of sheer arrogance, a human urge to prove the point that we are not completely helpless against death. But of course we are, and we politely declined in favor of getting back into Mama's truck and making the long drive home. Dane slept for most of it, worn out by all the prodding and questions and tubes. We sat in the back seat together, his head in my lap as he dozed and I stared out the window, idly stroking his hair and wondering how long it would be before it was all gone. We'd agreed to chemotherapy solely to placate the doctor, though even he had admitted that it was unlikely to change anything.

For the time being though, we went home. Dane slept, we all slept, and in the morning we began making our plans. He died six months later, chemotherapy long since having predictably failed, and our mother finally put her foot down and insisted that her twenty-year-old son was absolutely not going to die in some cold hospital bed. We took him home again, Mama and I lifting him into our arms and lying him in his bed, tucking him in. He waited until she went downstairs to make tea to gesture for me to come closer.

"Sasha," he said, his voice hoarse and weak. He was a shadow of Dane by then, but I laced my fingers through his. "It's going to be tonight. I can feel it."

I was not cold, no matter what the doctor might have thought, and I swallowed the thickness in my throat. "I swear I won't stop looking until we find each other again," I said. He pulled my hand to his chest, pressing my palm over his heart so that I could feel its last few beats, the finale to the ancient song it had been playing all his life. It slowed, stuttered into irregularity, and finally thudded one last time just as our mother stepped into the doorway of his bedroom with a tray of steaming tea mugs.

My quiet, vibrantly intelligent brother was dead. Our chess games that always lasted long into the night were over, the final checkmate won. He had been strange and solemn like me, we had gone for walks together to look for spiders. He was so light at that point that it was a small thing for my mother to lift his body into her arms, carrying him downstairs like a new bride to prepare his body. "Come with me, Sasha," she said softly to me, pausing in the doorway. "You have to be a part of this." Caretaking had been the family business for decades, the trade passed on to my mother via the same mortuary school from which he'd graduated by her husband, my father, whose body had been prepared by her after his death just as Dane's was to be.

The preparation room was technically our basement, the cement chill down there ideal for preserving decomposing human flesh. Mama liked to work with music, and tonight it was a lone cello that played on her little stereo, a musician whose tone I did not recognize, but the moaning ache in their piece suited my mood. Already, I missed Dane in a hideous, gaping sort of way. I felt blown open to the hollows of my chest - death had always been a distant reality for me, someone else's grief as I'd stood in the corner of the coffin display room watching my mother comfort the bereaved. I hadn't even really comprehended until this moment that the death of Dane's body also meant the death of his voice, his presence, the way his dark eyes crinkled when he smiled one of his faint smiles. I kept waiting for him to sit up on the long metal table.

Mama took Dane's left ankle into both hands, kneading his calf with a strange sort of tenderness, carefully extending his leg until his knee was straight, gently easing the stiffness that rigor mortis would create in him. I watched as she worked on his legs, finally approaching the table to reach for one of his arms. He had a tall, whippy strength that lingered still in his firm biceps and broad chest. I pulled his arms straight, I even flexed his fingers outward until they stayed that way, and Mama began to undress him. The air in the basement increased the natural chill already seeping into his dead flesh, the moon-pale skin we'd inherited from Mama, already ravaged to a sickly pallor by chemotherapy, had dulled into a bloodless chalkiness. His thickening blood was already settling, pooling into a deep, round bruise wider than the span of my hand at the center of his slim back.

I was not especially embarrassed when Mama tugged off his flannel pajama pants, folding them in an oddly fussy gesture that was uncharacteristic of her, but it was a strange thing to see my brother so vulnerable there on the table. He'd always been so steady, so unfazed and sedately intellectual, to swallow the brutal reality of his human nudity was a bitter experience. Mama draped a long, folded white cloth over his hips for the sake of dignity, a sentimentality that I'd always expected we'd only reserve for the dead loved ones of others. But she too was mourning, I knew. Dane had learned to be a rock from her. They were both capable of sitting in the same spot for hours sometimes, as silent and motionless as a watchful cat.

Wordlessly, she handed me a bottle of disinfectant as she pushed over the tall metal tank of embalming fluid to attach its long rubber tube to the spout on the side. I went to work, wiping down and spritzing Dane's body with our chemicals, the sharply medicinal tang the cause behind my suddenly-watery eyes. At least, that was what I planned on telling Mama. My brother was as still and patient in death as he'd always been in life, his limbs pliant in my hands. I cleaned his skin with the same care that I'd clumsily attempted when I used to rub his shoulders for him after a long day, willing the tension from his muscles when my hands weren't up to the task.

I picked up the small razor on Mama's table and smoothed some thick white foam from a bottle over his face when I was done, scraping his perpetual five o'clock shadow away so that Mama's makeups wouldn't settle into it and result in a cake-like appearance. The next part was more complicated, so Mama abandoned the tank of fluid to help me. With a long, curved needle, she sewed his jaw shut from the still-wet, pink flesh below his gums, joining his upper and lower jaw. She left an opening on the left side to insert the plastic nozzle of a small gun that looked like a caulking gun, pulling the trigger and flooding his mouth with a chalky paste to fill it out and keep his lips from withdrawing and baring his teeth. Then she finished sewing him up, and with every minute that ticked by he looked more and more as if he were asleep.

"Drain him for me, sweetie," Mama said, nodding in the direction of the arterial draining pump in the corner. I understood that this was a test, and approached it with an increasing nervousness that fluttered in my chest like a trapped bird. But the hollow needle slid into Dane's jugular with ease after I slit a tiny incision with Mama's scalpel that opened up his obliging artery. I could almost hear his encouragement of my work, his gentle reassurance that I was doing just fine. His dead blood filled the tubing of our draining tank, rushing so quickly into its belly that I couldn't detect any liquid movement through the clear plastic. It wasn't long before his skin paled even more, the tiny freckles that had been so light before suddenly visible, dotting his arms and chest. 

Together, Mama and I watched until it was done, and then I was opening up the wound I'd created again, inserting the tip of the embalming tube, turning the knob on the tank that would send it flooding into my brother's body. "Well done," Mama said to me, running a gloved hand over my hair until I relaxed. "I'll take it from here, you go rest." The jagged bite of Dane's death had become increasingly sharper in my chest as we'd worked, and so I only nodded and obeyed, trudging wearily back up the stairs and through the casket room. I made my way up the second flight, a faint cloud of disinfectant smell hovering around me, but without the will to go wash it off I collapsed face-down onto my bed.

I thought I'd never sleep, but when I awoke it was morning again and Mama was gone. She'd left tea and toast on the counter for me, along with a note explaining that she'd driven into town to file the paperwork for Dane's death at the county office. Some fleeting, sleep-hazy part of me experienced a brief surge of delusion that perhaps yesterday had been a dream, and I almost stumbled rushing down the stairs into the basement to check. But Dane was still on the table, the room left even colder than before to preserve him. "You promised," I reminded him, a childish accusation in my tone as I sank to my knees to kneel beside his table. "Send the spiders."

He didn't respond, and after giving him a few minutes before abandoning my resolve, I sighed and rose to my numb, tingling feet. "Don't forget," I warned him, before heading back upstairs to eat and shower and change. Autumn lingered as it always did this far north in New England, and so I wrapped myself in one of Dane's thick, dark brown cableknit sweaters that hung past my knees as he'd been so tall, over a pair of my leggings and a rust-red scarf Mama had knitted for me long ago, my sturdy walking boots and glasses. I couldn't afford to miss anything, not today.

Despite our difference in height, I had to pause as I passed our hallway mirror, inspecting my own face with the sudden realization that Dane and I looked alike. I'd never believed it before, but our fair skin and short, dark brown hair had become the same, though his was thicker and curlier. Our prominent noses and full, expressive mouths, the smattering of light freckles across our cheeks. We even shared the same serious, thoughtful light in our amber-brown eyes, I realized with some pleasure. My brother's eyes would live on in me, I decided as I left the house. 

Dry, dead leaves crunched pleasantly under my boots as I entered the thick, sprawling woods that surrounded our house, the crisp air filling my lungs until my nose ran a bit. I was careful in my step, pausing every few seconds to check for spiders. I saw many of them - ambling, fat-bodied wolf spiders, pale brown house spiders, even a black widow. Shiny and delicate as a jewel, she waited at the center of a magnificent web woven between two tree branches just at my eye level. "Dane?" I whispered to her, leaning in. But she had no messages for me, and eventually I gave up. Dusk began to settle, cooling the air and dimming the sky, rendering spiders all but invisible if more active. I made the long walk home with numb fingers and my first suspicion that maybe my brother and I were crazy. Maybe there was no way to contact me from the afterlife. Maybe Dane's rotting flesh in our basement was all that was left of him, after all.

Mama was home when I got back, downstairs working on Dane. She was dressing him, tugging his best suit pants up his legs. But he'd never really liked that suit, had never been partial to formal clothes or manners at all. "Put him in his regular clothes," I pleaded with Mama. "He hated having to dress up." She knew it was true, despite what protocol dictated. After a moment of consideration, she nodded.

"Run up to his room and find something he'd like," she said, and I wasted no time. The crisp white Oxford shirt folded into a neat square in his tall mahogany dresser, over one of his blue-and-cream-colored argyle sweaters. His worn jeans, the denim dark and soft with years of use, his wool socks and his glasses. I gathered all of them into my arms, pausing to press my face to the bundle there, inhaling his familiar scent and riding out the wave of bone-deep aching for him until it passed. It was then that I saw the argiope, the golden orb-weaver, waiting in the far right corner of his ceiling, watching.

I held my breath. "Dane?" I exhaled in a soft whoosh, stepping closer with his clothes still in my arms. Orb weavers were uncommon to find in houses, this one at least four inches across with a heavy, teardrop-shaped abdomen and long, spindly legs. Its black and yellow markings were elegantly precise just as my brother had been, and it tiptoed delicately and deliberately down Dane's wall and across the floor. Right to me. I froze when it stepped up onto my shoe, creeping up my leg, up my belly over my sweater. I moved carefully to put down his clothes, scooping it into one hand and lifting it to my face.

"Did my brother send you?" I said quietly, hesitant. The spider did not respond, but lifted a front leg to brush it against my cheek. I knew, the understanding filling my chest like our embalming fluids downstairs, that this was what I had been waiting for. The only problem was that our chosen vehicle of communication, selected in a burst of inspired if illogical sentimentality, could not speak to me. The argiope spider could only perch in my palm and watch, its intent clear even if its ability to act upon it was limited. "Dane," I said, and the spider turned around in a circle in my palm, lifting her abdomen in a helpless gesture that was almost akin to a shrug.

"There has to be a way," I whispered to her. "If you look, I'll look too. Together, I bet we can figure this out. Tell your friends." The spider paused, but when I lowered my open hand to Dane's bed, she stepped off and tiptoed away, across the hardwood floor and through the cracked window. I picked up Dane's clothes again, and went downstairs, where Mama was brushing his hair and humming softly to her son. We had not inherited our looks from her, our mother whose skin was as milk-pale and freckled as her wild, vibrantly red and curly hair suggested. Her eyes were a deep, morning-sky blue, round and youthful even in her fifties. She and I were petite, with bony wrists and slim hips, while Dane and our father had been long, lumbering frames of bulk and bear-like grace.

I helped her dress him, buttoning up his shirt with nervous fingers. Mama had done up his face with such eerie precision that the sleeping affect for which every caretaker strove was executed perfectly. Dane looked exactly as if he were just dozing, there on the embalming table, to wake up any minute now and ask me if I wanted to play chess. The muscles of his face were slack enough to suggest that soon his eyes would slide open as he shrugged off a deep sleep and rejoined the world. Mama made no comment when I rested my head on his chest, pressing my cheek to that looming emptiness inside of him where his heartbeat had once thudded steadily.

It was early the next morning that Casper J. Saltpeter knocked on my front door, the kind of annoyingly kitschy knock that annoyingly kitschy people think is cute. A rhythm of sorts, a kind of song to announce his presence as if that would make the appearance of a total stranger in my home all right; pa-pa-pa pum pum. I opened it anyway, because we so rarely had visitors outside of the bereaved, and Mama had put a professional hiatus on our caretaking services so that we could focus our full attention on Dane. I expected someone from town, there to plead with us to handle their dead loved one's preparations, aware of our reputation for being the best in the area.

But instead, Casper J. Saltpeter, whose name I did not yet know, stood there in my doorway. He was not so tall as my brother had been, but he still had a good four or five inches on me. He was stockier, broad shoulders and big hands and round hazel eyes that were more green than brown. His hair was messy and auburn, trimmed reasonably short but still managing to be in disarray, his square jaw softened by his round cheeks, both dusted with stubble that trailed down his throat. When he smiled, his front teeth were slightly crooked, and two dimples flashed in a disarmingly charming way.

"Morning. Sasha Fallon?" he said, arching an eyebrow down at me. 

"We're not taking any bodies right now," I informed him. "Try the Downing funeral home, it's only fifteen minutes out of town."

"Luckily, I have no bodies in need of preparing," he responded evenly, sliding a hand into his back pocket to retrieve a pack of cigarettes, tapping one out and offering me one before lighting it. I declined, having never been fond of the scent, but to be fair I had yet to invite him inside. "Your mother's gone, right? The spiders said she planned on grocery shopping today."

Finally, my attention was won, and I blinked up at him. "The spiders sent you?" I all but whispered, a cold rush filling me as I realized that the argiope had lived up to her end of the bargain.

"Casper J. Saltpeter," he introduced with a little bow that was oddly old-fashioned. Much about him was oddly old-fashioned in fact, down to his neatly pressed charcoal-gray slacks and shiny black shoes, the gray and white pinstriped vest he wore with an actual pocket watch clipped to it, over a crisp white shirt much like the one Dane wore downstairs. "Professional necromancer, at your service."

"Necromancer," I responded slowly, considering how long it would take me to get to Mama's long, sharp letter opener on the living room desk behind me. But Casper laughed in a huff of smoke, shaking his head.

"Come on now, someone like you who can boast such an inordinate familiarity with death. You can't possibly think that this is all there is, can you?"

"Did Dane's spiders really send you?"

"Your brother is in some trouble, Sasha. He was wise to choose spiders as his vehicle of communication, you know. Spiders have always been naturally adept at crossing the barriers of life and death, couriers from this world into the next. That's why so many people are afraid of them - deep in the collective human consciousness, that primordial mind that lingers below all of our technological arrogance, we associate them with death and the unknown. The spiders were able to find your brother in the other place, to take his message back to you. But you didn't know how to interpret it, the proper spells to understand it, so they found me. I advertise in the paper. It's surprisingly non-lucrative, necromancy. Are you going to let me in, or...?"

I blinked, suddenly remembering that he was still standing on the porch. "Put that out first," I felt compelled to demand, pointing to his cigarette. He rolled his eyes, but obeyed as he entered the house. He inhaled deeply as I shut the door behind him, a strange response. "The things I could do here," he said, apparently pleased. "I've often considered becoming a student at a mortuary school, solely for the necromantic advances I could make in such a place. But it's tricky business, you know, surrounding yourself with that many bodies when you're a natural necromancer. The dead are already drawn to me by default, I feel like becoming a mortuary student would put a strain on my free time. Sometimes a man just wants to go have a pint and entertain some ladies without an entourage of ghosts demanding favors hovering about."

His voice was distinctly accented, crisp and British, west London most likely. "What sort of trouble is Dane in?" I demanded, not even bothering to put tea on, instead leaning up against the side of one of our coffins and locking my stare onto his.

"It's bad, love. I've suspected for some time that something is going on in the other place, some mass discourse, but for some reason the spirits I've contacted have been reticent. It struck me as strange, because usually ghosts are so pleased to find a willing link to the breathing world that they'll ramble on forever and ask endless questions." He sat down in the chair by the tall stand with our guestbook without being invited. "From what I can gather, someone is trying to take control of the entirety of the other place. The dead world isn't meant to be controlled by anyone...I suppose I should back up and explain."

"Do," I said sharply, and he laughed again.

"Make us some tea. This is going to get complicated." I finally obliged, taking him into the kitchen and putting tea on, sitting at our round wooden table with him and crossing my legs, waiting. "Sasha, first of all you need to understand that the other place isn't like any of your books, or the bible, or anything."

"I've never even read the bible, so don't worry about any preconceived misconceptions on my part."

"A person's death pocket begins constructing itself for them from the moment of their birth, Sasha. Every thought, every wish, every dream and fear and hope and pet peeve and experience that you've ever had, it all collects into this enormous mass of energy that is released directly upon your death and expelled into the other place for you,, manifesting finally in what's called your "death pocket." 

"You're saying that our...what, our heaven? That's created for us by the force of our personalities?"

"If we must use biblical terminology, I suppose, yes. But it's not even necessarily a heaven - if you're a wretched person, all of that pain and fear and whatever else you've brought into the world is expelled into a hideous place in the dead world, waiting for you. The other place consists of layers upon layers of pockets, if a workaholic is a good person who just happens to feel most happy and fulfilled when he's working, then his pocket will likely consist of a bustling urban landscape in which he commutes to work and accomplishes much and gets promoted every day. If a lonely, depressed woman who struggled all her life and never gave up only ever longed for a solitary log cabin in the woods of Montana to paint and read, that's exactly where she'll go when she dies. Just like our living lives, our experiences in death are shaped by our desires and actions."

"What if you're married, with a family? How can you be happy in death without the people you love?"

"Ah, this is where it gets romantic," Casper said, amused. I rose from the table to get the tea, pouring and listening. "If two people, or three people, or a family, love each other enough? They'll all be sent to the same pocket upon dying. It has to be the purest kind of love though, not necessarily conflict-free, but the deepest and most genuine devotion. Say for instance, a mother dies before her children. When she's sent to her pocket, it will be a collective effort of everything they've all ever wanted, and her spirit will know that she's just waiting for them to join her. So she can relax and wish them long, happy lives, knowing that someday they'll come home to her again. Isn't that lovely?"

"So Dane is waiting for me somewhere?"

"He should be. You should see the library in his pocket, it's magnificent. But there's a problem. Dane's been taken."

A hot, sick twist low in my belly gripped me then, my blood going as cold as my brother's. As cold as the blood of the spiders that had brought Casper to me. "Taken by whom?" I said, slowly.

"Ah, that's where I've been gathering information for months now," Casper said thoughtfully, tapping his long fingers against our tabletop until I could have stomped his foot. "Talking to ghosts, making brief excursions into the dead world myself, trying to figure out what's going on. It's tricky for me, breathing tourists are generally unwelcome in the other place. From what I can tell, there was once a man. His name is Luke...Luke Lander, from the information I was able to glean from his breathing days. You may have heard of him."

"We don't get out much," I informed Casper, and he laughed and shook his head.

"I can imagine. Luke Lander, Sasha, was fairly well-known. His family was very wealthy, they owned and ran a fine jewelry company out of New York, London and Paris. He grew up sickeningly rich, completely unmonitored by any semblance of adult authority, and uninhibited by the limitations of most. I'm sure you can imagine what sort of personality this fostered. It seems he takes as well to being denied the things he wants in death as he did in life. Which is to say, he's decided that if he can't have a pocket with the person he loves most, he's going to destroy the dead world. Or at least control it, in the hopes of generating a pocket for himself that suits him."

"Why can't he have a pocket with his love?"

"He doesn't deserve it, frankly. He was an awful person - not a monster, but one of those rude, spoiled, selfish bastards who make life a little more difficult and annoying for everyone around them while they sail on, completely unconcerned with the feelings of others. He was a bully, the worst kind of American-royalty stereotype. He had everything, and he appreciated none of it because he'd been raised to take it for granted. Which isn't entirely his fault, but there comes a point in which a person is responsible for their own actions, for developing their own moral compass. It's strange too, because the person he loves? Absolute angel. His name is Peter. He was a mathematics student at MIT, they met when the Lander family opened up a showcase in Boston and Luke ended up living there for a while when he took a liking to the city."

"But even if Luke doesn't deserve a pocket with Peter, why should Peter's spirit suffer? Isn't his love for Luke enough to create a pocket for both of them?"

"Normally, it would be. But Luke's bitterness and anger has created a spiritual block that prevents that, Peter's love can't dissolve it no matter how much he's left alone in his own pocket, longing for Luke. Just like in their lives together, Luke's selfishness is holding them back. In life, Peter had the luxury of being patient with Luke, working to make him a better person so that their relationship could evolve. But those days are over, all the dead world recognizes is energy and response. Think of it like the human body, like nature - the heart, the muscle itself, doesn't care or understand that the person carrying it is a living saint. If it's going to stop beating, that's just the way of things. A monsoon is incapable of recognizing the goodness of the people in the village it's about to destroy. That's the dead world. It only knows energy."

"What does any of this have to do with Dane?"

“Luke has been invading pockets throughout the dead world for some time now, Sasha. There are dark magics there, schools of thought and theory and active energy that are available to any spirit lost enough to seek them out and harness them. Luke’s been taking souls from their pockets and dragging them into his own, draining and poisoning them, both in the interest of boosting his own energy output and creating an army of mindless shells who will attack anyone he tells them to. He’s been tearing these souls from the homes they damn well earned, so that he can burn down the dead world and reshape it to his liking. With Peter, who has no idea that any of this is happening. He’s trapped in his own pocket, alone and aching.” Casper’s tone went a touch darker then, and I wondered if perhaps he wasn’t personally invested in this. Maybe Dane hadn’t been the only loved one in this room who had been taken.

“Has anyone tried going into Peter’s pocket? Maybe he can talk to Luke.”

“You don’t understand. Never seeing Peter again is part of Luke’s punishment for the life he lived, both in the breathing world and the dead one. Innocent people suffer when their loved ones are selfish and cruel in the dead world, just like in this one. Luke’s actions have doomed them both.”

We fell silent, there in the kitchen. Casper looked down helplessly at the table, cupping his mug of tea in both hands. My mind roiled, a sick tightness gripping my belly. Somewhere, Dane was lost and hurting and afraid because this bastard was determined that the rules of consequence should be changed for him. My anger began to stir, heating me up from the inside out, my teeth clenching. “So what now?” I finally demanded, desperate for some kind of retaliation, a solution.

Casper shrugged. “I don’t know. Honestly, I was hoping you’d have some ideas. I thought maybe that was why the spiders sent me to you.”

“Dane and I used to love playing hide and seek as kids,” I said slowly, struggling to piece something solid together. “Even when we grew up, we’d leave little surprises around the house for each other, little notes and treats. If he had any time at all before Luke took him, he would have left me clues.”

“He’d never have expected that you’d know about the dead world, or that you’d have any idea how to get to his pocket,” Casper pointed out. “I doubt he would have bothered, if he even had that much time.”

“He knew that I’d know he was somewhere, though,” I argued. “He promised to send the spiders to me long before he died. Can you at least take me to his pocket? So we can look?”

“It’s not that easy,” Casper responded slowly, tapping out another cigarette from his pack but cringing and putting it back under the weight of my glare. “Living people can’t just “go” to death pockets like driving down the street. It’s a lot of complicated magic, materials and willpower. Not everyone emerges from an attempt unscathed, there are things out there that don’t want you breaking through the protective layer between this world and the next. Ancient creatures, created solely to keep necromancers like me from slipping through the cracks. It’s an age-old animosity we have between us, and you’re not even a necromancer. I can try to protect you from their notice with my spells, but I can’t promise anything.”

“If I die,” I retorted, meeting his eyes with my best attempt at a steely gaze, “I’ll just reunite with Dane anyway, in our pocket. It’s the easiest way to save him, if what you’re telling me is true. So we win either way.”

“Nice try. But there are consequences for defying the authority of the shadow guardians. They have the power to do to you what they did to Luke and Peter, to punish your insolence by separating the two of you for all of eternity.”

“But don’t they understand what they’ve done in doing so? Why can’t someone explain to them that unless they give Peter back to Luke, he’ll destroy everything?”

“Because that would be caving to his terrorism, and they’re too proud. It’s a smart move, their only move, really – if they gave him what he wanted, other souls punished in such a way would get ideas. Luke already has a modicum of support from other bitter souls who will never see their loved ones again and are trapped in pockets of miserable solitude. If he generates enough of them to his side, things could get even worse. Most of them are too afraid of further punishment to be too vocal in their support.”

“Goddamn, you can’t even escape politics in the afterlife,” I muttered bitterly, and Casper’s smile was thin and humorless.

“I’m going to talk to some other necromancer contacts, see what I need to gather and prepare to try and get you there. Just lie low in the meantime, don’t talk to any more spiders. We don’t know who’s on to us, what might be trying to sabotage you. Even coming here was a risk, once you open yourself to the dead world you become visible to them. But I’ll be in touch.” He rose to his feet, and I with him.  
“Please find a way to get me to my brother,” I said quietly, struggling to not let despair flood me the way it had shortly after his death when I’d doubted the appearance of his spiders. “You don’t understand what he means to me, I can’t stand the idea of him suffering. He suffered enough before his death, he deserves peace now.” I reached out and curled my small fingers around Casper’s forearm, swallowing hard. Casper went soft around the eyes then, and lifted a hand to touch my cheek. It soothed me somehow, despite my general opposition to being touched by strangers.

“I’ll do my best,” he promised me. “You’ll hear from me either way.” Then he was gone, leaving the way he’d come and sliding into a clunky old black Volvo that he’d parked in our driveway where Mama’s truck normally would have been. I watched his exit from the display room window, clutching one of our somberly heavy wine-red velvet curtains in one hand to expose the long, slender road leading out through the woods and to the main access road into town. Dusk was seeping in, dimming the overcast early-autumn sky, chilling the air further. Suddenly, I was alone again, this time with my mind brimming over with new information and anxiety. I knew instinctively that Casper had told me nothing but the truth, had always known somewhere in the back of my mind that there was a world of shadows beyond the cold bodies we treated in our basement.

Mama’s truck rumbled up the winding road, where Casper’s had been just a few minutes ago. It was barely wide enough for two vehicles, I mused, they must have passed each other at some point. I wondered if she’d glanced up, if some part of her hadn’t sensed the presence of this man with the potential to contact her dead son, and I let the curtain fall shut as she killed the engine outside.


End file.
